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The great global warming collapse

It is dangerous to use local weather events (such as a heavy or light winter) to make judgments about global climate.

With that caveat, I’m blogging the following because I’ve noted a shift in the online discussion about “global warming,” or the more general “climate change”. This essay does a good job exploring the events driving what seems to be a populist pushback.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

[…]

Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was
labelled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists
now sense a sinking ship, and they’re bailing out. Among them is Andrew
Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges
that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even
Britain’s Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri’s resignation. India
says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global
warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn’t real, or that human
activity doesn’t play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or
that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t valid. But the
strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed
the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed. —Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail